Either I’m having really bad luck or Western Digital is making crap drives. Just before Halloween I bought a new 1TB drive to replace the 500GB that failed. If you recall I have two Western Digital 500GB drives that mirror each other with all my pictures stored on them. Since I can’t replace these files I needed to get my backup in place and dupes of all the files. Now that I have dupes of the files my other Western Digital 500GB has decided to call it quits. The drive is throwing delayed write errors and the Event Log looks like a stuck pig full of red event errors.

Now it’s not like the drive has been pleading for help for weeks and I’ve just turned a blind eye to the situation. The drive literally started throwing errors a few hours ago and now it’s unreadable by Windows. Plus, I got the drive in October 2007 so the damn thing is just barely past two years old. Additionally I haven’t been using that machine very much this past year so the drive quite literally has only a few hours of actual use on it.

To put it bluntly I’m f@$king furious with Western Digital right now. The odds of two drives failing that close together are astronomical, but yet they did. And I can only count my blessings for getting a new drive and copying the files over before the other piece of $hit failed tonight. I was right on the cusp of losing four years worth of digital photos. Every single picture I’ve taken is on those drives. I thought a mirror would be the most practical way of having a backup. In this case it actually did work, but the backup is only as good as the drives themselves and from where I sit Western Digital drives are pieces of junk and can’t be trusted.

Suffice it to say that is the last Western Digital drive I’m ever going to buy and I will never recommend one to anyone ever again. Had the drives been five or six years old with thousands of hours on them this might make sense. But they’re not. Two years old and minimum usage hardly explains what’s happened.

I’m running a check on the drive that Windows can still partially access, although I’m not sure why since I can’t trust the drive and won’t ever put anything important on it. They’re nothing more than fancy paperweights with pretty blue and green flashing buttons on them.

As I write this I’m copying my files to a non Western Digital drive so I will once again have two copies. I really can’t believe these two pieces of crap failed this close together. Maybe the internal drives are better, but I’m never getting a WD MyBook or another version ever again. Having a mirror of my images definitely saved me, but this goes to show you your backups are only as good as the drives they sit on.